Top 500 R.F. Kuang Quotes (2026 Update)
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451. “She would have torn apart kingdoms for this woman. She would have followed her to the gates of hell and back. This was her ruler. This was whom she was meant to serve.”

— R.F. Kuang

452. “If it’s focus that you want, I can give you focus. I can concentrate on anything. But to empty my mind? To be devoid of all thought? All sense of self? What good does that serve?” “It serves to sever you from the material world,” Jiang answered. “How do you expect to reach the spirit realm when you’re obsessing over the things in front of you?”

— R.F. Kuang

453. “It doesn’t matter how lenient, how gracious, how invested in your education they make out to be. Masters are masters in the end.”

— R.F. Kuang

454. “Nezha reached for her shoulder. “Meimei. Come on.” Meimei. Little sister.”

— R.F. Kuang

455. “You want to do the right thing,’ said Ramy, bullish. ‘You always do. But you think the right thing is martyrdom. You think if you suffer enough for whatever sins you’ve committed, then you’re absolved.”

— R.F. Kuang

456. “It was a funny thing, how fear made him look so much younger, how it rounded his eyes and erased the cruel grimace of his sneer so that he looked, just for an instant, like the boy she’d first met at Sinegard.”

— R.F. Kuang

457. “Watching someone warp your image and tell your story however they choose, knowing you have no power to stop it? No voice? That’s how we all felt, watching you. Pretty awful, huh?”

— R.F. Kuang

458. “The point of revenge wasn’t to heal. The point was that the exhilaration, however temporary, drowned out the hurt.”

— R.F. Kuang

459. “The subject of today’s lesson will be plants.” He sat down, pulled off his satchel, and emptied the contents onto the grass. Out spilled an assortment of plants and powders, the severed arm of a cactus, several bright red poppy flowers with pods still attached, and a handful of sun-dried mushrooms. “Are we getting high?” Rin said. “Oh, wow. We’re getting high, aren’t we?” “I’m getting high,” said Jiang. “You’re watching.”

— R.F. Kuang

460. “He reached into his memory to recall how Chinese conversations felt, how Mandarin sounded when it rolled naturally off his tongue, when he didn’t have to pause to remember the tones of the next word he uttered. But he was forgetting. That terrified him. Sometimes, during practice conversations, he found himself blanking on a word he used to toss around constantly. And sometimes he sounded, to his own ears, like a European sailor imitating Chinese without knowing what he said.”

— R.F. Kuang

461. “On the topic of cultural exposition, she’s written that she doesn’t “see the need to move the text closer to the reader, when the reader has Google, and is perfectly capable of moving closer to the text.”

— R.F. Kuang

462. “Christ,” said Peter. “Hell is a campus.”

— R.F. Kuang

463. “The two most popular opium brands here are called Patna and Malwa. Both regions in India. From my home straight to yours, Birdie. Isn’t that funny?’ Ramy glanced sideways at him. ‘The British are turning my homeland into a narco-military state to pump drugs into yours. That’s how this empire connects us.”

— R.F. Kuang

464. “You would be stunned.” The Sorqan Sira looked very sad. “You have no idea how many men are like Altan Trengsin.”

— R.F. Kuang

465. “Every time I see Tom, I wonder what it would be like to go through life with the easy contentment of a rock.”

— R.F. Kuang

466. “Birdie, I hate it in this country. I hate the way they look at me, I hate being passed around at their wine parties like an animal on display. I hate knowing that my very presence at Oxford is a betrayal of my race and religion, because I’m becoming just that class of person Macaulay hoped to create.”

— R.F. Kuang

467. “Rin was somewhat wary of gambling her life on the designs of a boy whose greatest passion in life was watching things explode, but she supposed that at this point she had very few options.”

— R.F. Kuang

468. “Power dictates acceptability,” Kitay mused. “If the capital had been built in Tikany, I’m sure we’d be running around dark as wood bark.”

— R.F. Kuang

469. “She saw it in a flash of utter clarity. She knew what she had to do. The only path, the only way forward. And what a familiar path it was. It was so obvious now. The world was a dream of the gods, and the gods dreamed in sequences, in symmetry, in patterns. History repeated itself, and she was only the latest iteration of the same scene in a tapestry that had been spun long before her birth.”

— R.F. Kuang

470. “I have tamed a land created to wither humans away until they are polished bone. Do not think to defy me.”

— R.F. Kuang

471. “Can’t I be happy? I’ve missed you.”

— R.F. Kuang

472. “Your languages determine how interesting you are.”

— R.F. Kuang

473. “As a child she knew her motherland as a place of violence and barbaric power struggles, for that is how they spoke of it in France, and that was what her exiled mother chose to believe. ‘We are lucky,’ whispered her mother, ‘that we survived it.’ But her mother did not survive France.”

— R.F. Kuang

474. “Believe the lie – trust the lie – it is the only thing you have. Stay in the cage and paint the walls. If you do not, then you must quit; but if you can delude yourself long enough, then your delusions might very well come true.”

— R.F. Kuang

475. “Never mind that thirty seconds ago she’d been ready to kill him. His voice, his very presence, made her heart ache – she wished desperately they could be caught in a stalemate, that for just one minute the wars surrounding them could be suspended, so that they might speak like friends again. Just once.”

— R.F. Kuang

476. “The camera had distorted and flattened the spirit that bond them, and the invisible warmth and camaraderie between them appeared now like a stilted, forced closeness. Photography, he thought, was also a kind of translation, and they had all come out the poorer for it.”

— R.F. Kuang

477. “And that was the heart of it all, wasn’t it? Robin had always been willing, in theory, to give up only some things for a revolution he halfway believed in. He was fine with resistance as long as it didn’t hurt him. And the contradiction was fine, as long as he didn’t think too hard about it, or look too closely. But.”

— R.F. Kuang

478. “Hell’s not so bad for the people who are in it. They’re exactly where they wanted to be.”

— R.F. Kuang

479. “This wasn’t about lust, this was about power. This was about possession. He wanted to dominate her just so that later he could crow that he had.”

— R.F. Kuang

480. “Now he was astonished by how much he missed them. The English made regular use of only two flavours – salty and not salty – and did not seem to recognize any of the others. For a country that profited so well from trading in spices, its citizens were violently averse to actually using them; in all his time in Hampstead, he never tasted a dish that could be properly described as ‘seasoned’, let alone ‘spicy’.”

— R.F. Kuang

481. “Martial arts is no more complicated than pure physics. If that confuses you, then simply take the advice of the grand masters. Don’t ask questions. Just obey.”

— R.F. Kuang

482. “We’re sitting here because we’re already barely tolerated, and because as long as we don’t move too quickly or speak too loudly, we can blend into the background or at least pretend to be serving staff. That’s how this works, Letty. A brown man at an Oxford ball is a fun curiosity as long as he keeps to himself and manages not to offend anyone, but if I dance with you, then someone’s going to hit me, or worse.”

— R.F. Kuang

483. “He made some gestures with his hands that clarified nothing.”

— R.F. Kuang

484. “I don’t feel the same black, suffocating loss I did when my father died. I don’t struggle to breathe. I don’t lie awake in the mornings debating whether it’s worth crawling out of bed. I don’t resent every stranger I encounter, wondering how they can keep moving around the world as if it hasn’t stopped turning.”

— R.F. Kuang

485. “It’s about wishing you know who your parents were. It’s about needing things from your parents you’ll never get. When you’re in the zone, drafting doesn’t feel like an effortful artifice. It feels like remembering, putting down in written form something that has been locked inside you all along.”

— R.F. Kuang

486. “They could cast us in a movie together. Florence Pugh will play me. That girl from Crazy Rich Asians will play Athena.”

— R.F. Kuang

487. “It’s about wishing you knew who your parents were. It’s about needing things from your parents you’ll never get.”

— R.F. Kuang

488. “This was love, a love she had never known; At last, she thought, this is the real thing – this gradual unfolding of another soul, charting one’s course into priviliged inner territory, making discoveries of which you felt you were the first. Alice loved her work for just this reason, so why wouldn’t she fall in love with people, too?”

— R.F. Kuang

489. “I do not believe in Gods, but I believe in power.”

— R.F. Kuang

490. “So it’s what he needs. So it’s a vulnerability. I won’t judge him. I don’t dare, because I don’t have the right. And neither do you.”

— R.F. Kuang

491. “In London, which was slightly more cosmopolitan, foreigners never drew such prolonged stares. But Oxford’s townsfolk seemed constantly startled by their presence. Ramy attracted more attention than Robin did. Robin was foreign only when viewed up close and in certain lights, but Ramy was immediately, visibly other.”

— R.F. Kuang

492. “Altan had verbally abused her and hit her, but he had faith in her power. Altan had only ever wanted to make her stronger.”

— R.F. Kuang

493. “The Keju is a ruse to keep uneducated peasants right where they’ve always been. You slip past the Keju, they’ll find a way to expel you anyway. The Keju keeps the lower classes sedated. It keeps us dreaming. It’s not a ladder for mobility; it’s a way to keep people like me exactly where they were born.”

— R.F. Kuang

494. “She saw how scared he was, trapped and isolated in his own mind, watching his world break down around him because of irrationalities that he could not fix.”

— R.F. Kuang

495. “The tunnel turned out to be much wider than it appeared from the outside. They.”

— R.F. Kuang

496. “Pick one? Just one, of all these treasures?”

— R.F. Kuang

497. “Most authors would confess they hear an inner editor, an internal naysayer that hampers and nitpicks their attempts at first drafts. Mine has taken the form of Athena. Haughtily she peruses and dismisses every story idea I attempt: “too trite”, “too formulaic”, “too white”. She’s even harsher at the sentence level: “the rhythm’s off”, “that imagery doesn’t work”, “seriously, another em dash?”

— R.F. Kuang

498. “Order is present in the earthly kingdom when all beings understand their place. All beings understand their place when they fulfill roles set out for them. The fish does not attempt to fly. The polecat does not attempt to swim. Only when each being respects the heavenly order may there be peace.”

— R.F. Kuang

499. “What Alice needed most then was a nice long holiday, and then perhaps institutionalization at some remote facility near the sea.”

— R.F. Kuang

500. “Crying fits are to be conducted in private, that’s library rules.”

— R.F. Kuang